After a long absence I decided to take a look at UO dev again and maybe get my toes wet. My history with UO is mostly with RP shards. I've tried most of them out there but the only places I spent a significant amount of time are Fallen Ashes (way old) and TLEA (The Life Ever After). Additionally I ran a shard called Crossroads, it was a spinoff / sequel to TLEA. However it was extremely short lived so mostly unknown.

I am familiar with most aspect with UO dev. However my strongest skill is world building, its something I really enjoy. Scripting is not a problem for me as its in the same field as my day job but I sort of rather not do too much of it as I do enough in a day. Creating and running complex story lines is also something I enjoy a lot. When GM'ing my goal is to get the game experience close to a table top rpg. Working with players to achieve a more immersive experience is what I aspire to do but more often than not its easier said than done.

I've explored ForkUO a good while ago but did not spend a lot of time looking into it. I really liked how it was put together to support more complex modding. So now I will be taking a look at servUO and maybe get a little more familiar with it.

I've technically retired from all UO activities years ago but discussion with old friends on the topic has awakened my curiosity so I decided to sign up and see whats going.

So a warm hello to any here that know me and a hello, nice to meet you to any I do not.

AdminModerator

Hello and welcome to the community Francis Marsten. My UO roots grew deeply from roleplaying shards as well so i can appreciate a fellow RP enthusiast. There is surely no lack of world builders here in the Servuo community, just an overall lack of high quality ones if you catch my drift. I'm more into the graphical end of uo but i can see how having a day job that entails coding would cause one to avoid wanting to spend hours coding for uo. The ability to create complex and diverse story as well as maintaining and running them is something that all UO communities are in need of in my opinion. That will be a welcome and valuable asset. I have high respect for someone who wants to bring uo down to the detail of a table top rpg as that is one of my goals too.

I believe you will be pleasantly surprised with Servuo in comparison to its state from Forkuo. I will be as bold to say that Servuo definitively is the current future of UO emulation.
UO is a wonderful game and it truly is incredibly difficult to stay away for too long.

AdminModeratorServUO Developer

Long time no see m309, how's it going? All good I hope. Still working on that map and scripts?

Good to meet you Hank. Sadly RP is a little bit of a minority and for me its a critical aspect when it comes to immersion. I've started playing UO since its very release I can tell you I was in for a real shock not what I was expecting to encounter. I played on Chesapeake and little did I know that there was a whole RP community in game, they had this player town set up called Paxlair. Once UO emulation took the ground I left the official servers and went to place called Fallen Ashes.

If your curious I have a collection of screenshots from my past map work.

These screenshot cover my work and a teams of builders and came and went over the years. And I totally know what you mean about quality, some people have exceptional talent while others are a little awkward with their work. But as with anything practice makes perfect. I literally spent months working on making smooth mountains, it took a lot of practice to refine techniques. I was really driven to create so I kept at it. But for many map work seems more like a chore than an enjoyable activity.

Hank do you do sprite artwork as you mention being into the graphical side, or do you mean more in the map aspect?

As much fun there is in UO I have seen quite a fair share of nastiness, petty conflict, competition and what not. Where as a table top rpg is nothing but good times where everyone is contributing to the overall good experience. I'd love to see a change in dynamic how UO is played that can lead to a far better experience involved. Old friends from shards past have been itching to get some game going, they proposed a reboot of the world story we all played through. We know the world and setting by heart (well at least I do), if we can get enough of the past players involved we'd have the resources to pull off something interesting. One of the best experience was a time when we had 5-6 GMs to about 10-12 players. For a couple weeks we managed a semi continuing storyline during prime time hours. Sadly we ran out of map / world and the story hit a wall. It was an early release of the map we were working on at the time.

For now its an exploratory phase, see who is really into this idea. Potentially track down others who were involved with the game and then see if we want to commit any real time to this. I am looking forward to see what servUO has more to offer. I remember from fork that the core is completely exposed with built it support for new base data types for world save serialization. That alone is a major godsend, I remember unraveling runUO core to add in a base type. What a pain in the ass that was.

What RP shards did you play on out of curiosity? I wonder if we ever crossed paths.

Anyways my post has gotten sort of long winded so I am going to run. Take care

AdminModeratorServUO Developer

AdminModerator

Awesome map areas! The mountains with smooth slopes look much more natural with stones added here and there. Have you ever considered or have done a mountain slope in sort of levels with some rocks added and a bit of plant life, just wondering if that could be done?

Thank Milva. I do but its mostly for choice locations as its pretty time consuming to get it right. Slops have one negative aspect is that the don't play nice with statics they can get have swallowed by the terrain, of course correctable by adjusting the z-index. also in cases like these means transition tiles so more annoying details. Mind you the new centred makes transitions a walk in the park. I've wanted to always to add new rock / mountain terrain tiles the artwork so I can have different types of rock which mixes up the terrain a big. I believe pixel-uo might have release some mega rock statics for mountain peaks and stuff. Looks like stuff the arx-obscura team have.

The uo render engine is really nice, all kinds of really nice scenery is possible so more often its a question of how much time is given to stuff. My standard practice was do regions in multiple passes, because as an area gets colored out it often spawns new ideas. I spent years on this map on and off, you'd surprise how how of a distance the finish work actually covered. The new version of Centred from UO quintessence has features and tools that increases terrain work by a factor of 10. If I renewed my work on the map I'd be able to cover a ton of group. The art and resource files I used for the map are way outdated, I think it was last year spring discovered that the format of tile data and stuff changed to make my map with the custom art no longer usable with 7+ version of the client. I could not find any good solutions to fix the problem and just decided to drop it.

I remember the client never was an issue, but ea totally poo poo'ed on that.

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ServUO is a community built for players of Ultima Online. We offer various services including the popular open source Ultima Online server emulation software ServUO. We also offer many other services which you can discover.